


The Line is Dead

by mr_dr_felicia



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character Death, M/M, Soulmate AU, Victuuriweek2k17, WW2, doolittle raid, very little historical research done sorry, victuuriweek day 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 19:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9672209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mr_dr_felicia/pseuds/mr_dr_felicia
Summary: Viktor got his soulmark when he was sixteen.And he was twenty-eight when he finally met his soulmate.





	

**Author's Note:**

> happy early valentine's day!
> 
> this work only exists 'cause my awesome friend johnlockweirdo was there to remind me to finish it. Thanks Carla luv u <3
> 
> as mentioned in the tags, i didn't do a lot of research on this. But all you really need to know is that it's world war 2 and everything's sad. Ok, on with the fic!

A soulmark is like a telephone line.

It’s a telephone line without the actual wires and doesn’t need electricity to function, but it never gets cut or loses connection, even for a second. Once that tiny mark is on your skin, it’s there forever. There can be no lies when it comes to your soulmark. Covering it up won’t cut the connection you have with your soulmate, so the next best thing is learning to live with it. And learning to live with the fact that you had to use a _lot_ of soap to wash off the ink always left behind on your skin is always the first thing to get used to. But waking up to ugly handwriting scribbled across your palm doesn’t seem so bad once you realize that the ugly handwriting belongs to your soulmate.

Viktor got his soulmark when he was sixteen.

He hid it until he was seventeen.

Even after waiting a whole year, getting a soulmark that early in life was scarce enough for people to notice. The teacher at the old school Viktor and his siblings attended made Viktor roll up his sleeve in front of the class to show them all what a soulmark looked like. Children from the other classes Viktor didn’t even know came up to see the tiny mark up close. They all babbled in their strange accented English and Viktor mumbled back half-understandable responses. Even after all the time he’d spent in this country, he could never get the hang of their language.

Russia was still a home for him, and the rough accent of his mother tongue followed Viktor all the way to America, where everything the people talked about was war—war with the Russians, war with the Germans, a war with the whole world it seemed.

That was the first reason he’d put off telling anyone about his premature soulmark. The next was that after discovering the mark on his left wrist the first time, sixteen-year old Viktor had drawn their old dog right under the mark and expected a reply. None came.

He continued sending little doodles the whole year, and copied down phrases from his friends’ American books as practice with the strange new English alphabet. It was only when he’d turned seventeen that he had his friends Christophé and Mila watch over his shoulder as he wrote down his first note to his soulmate. They were immigrants just like him, but had come years earlier, Mila barely remembering what Russian winters felt like compared to the ones they got in New York. But they understood Viktor—both linguistically and emotionally— better than any other person, so Viktor trusted them. Christophé steadied his hand as he wrote, and Mila corrected his spelling.

Getting his soulmark early had seemed like such a good thing at the time, but as Viktor grew, he realized just how terrible it was. After his initial note, years had passed before he ever got a reply. And the reply hadn’t made any sense, the language it was in totally foreign to Viktor. He grew older and saw Mila and Chris get their soulmarks, a tiny sun stretched across the back of Christophé’s hand and the silhouette of a trout at the base of Mila’s neck. He grew even more and saw his friends scribbling away at their wrists and reading aloud the messages their soulmates wrote to them. He learned how to speak and write English and hid his accent efficiently enough for people not to notice. He attended his friends’ weddings.

A year after attending Christophé’s marriage, Viktor joined a flying school.

And three years after that, he was in the middle of the woods, face-to-face with his soulmate.

 

* * *

 

**1942, Quzhou**

Viktor groaned.

He was upside-down, the harness f his parachute digging painfully into his shoulders. His head throbbed from some unseen injury, and pressure squeezed at his head as more and more blood rushed down from his numb body. The silhouette of a large tree limb was a few feet above him, his parachute’s suspension lines caught in the branches, so he was _somewhat_ near the ground. Viktor swung an arm towards the ground and tried to feel for anything underneath him. Nothing but cold air brushed his fingertips. _Great._

Viktor cursed, hands fumbling at his harness. He leaned up and wrapped the suspension lines around one of his forearms, his gloved hand closing around the lines tight. His harness had three release tabs, and when Viktor pulled on one, his whole body sunk a few inches lower; the tree limb creaking above him. He pulled on the remaining two and his whole body slipped from the harness and dropped, the lines he’d wrapped around his arm cinching tight and stopping his fall half-way. Viktor felt the rush of blood leaving his head and he looked down.

Ten or more feet separated him from the ground.

Now that the pressure on his head was gone, Viktor felt the urgent ache coming from one of his legs. The pain overshadowed even the injury on his head (which was just a bruise, thankfully) and Viktor pinpointed that it probably came from his ankle. He winced as he climbed down the tree, the leg that had his injured ankle just deadweight by the time he’d reached the bottom.

He looked around him and saw no one else. He thought about his other crewmembers, and decided that he would first find some Chinese civilians to help him before looking for them.

But the place he’d landed in was desperately empty, and since he’d been hanging from that tree branch for a while, night had fallen. Viktor looked up and saw stars twinkling through the grey clouds. It would be raining soon, so he dragged himself to the nearest tree and rested his back against it, his knees giving out beneath him. He sat on the damp ground and gingerly pulled up his pantleg.

The bruise that wrapped around the expanse of his ankle was dark and purplish, the sight of it almost worse than the actual pain it caused.

Viktor prodded at his ankle, feeling bones crunch beneath the skin. This was bad. He had hoped it would only be a sprain or a popped socket, but it was obviously worse than that. Viktor groaned again, feeling the color drain from his skin when he tried to rotate his ankle. All he got in response was a sharp stab of pain that reached even his fingertips.

Parachuting out of his plane had been a good idea at the time, but landing into the mountains of Quzhou and getting his ankle twisted had proved to be almost worse than getting bombed out of the sky. At least dying in his plane would’ve been a quick and painless death.

He sighed, looking around him for the first time.

Rain had begun to fall. Droplets of it splattered onto the leaves above him, a tiny amount reaching past the foliage to drip into his hair and onto his face. Trees stretched out into the darkness everywhere Viktor looked, the trees even following the sharp dip of the slope just meters from where Viktor sat. The air wasn’t thin at all, so he was probably very near the bottom of the mountain. Viktor tore a thin strip of fabric from his pantleg to wrap around his ankle. It wouldn’t take very long to walk down the slope and find some farmers that could help him. He’d probably be beside a nice warm fire by mor—    

A branch snapped.

Viktor felt the heat of the flamethrower scorch off the stubble growing on his cheeks. He rolled onto his side, a second to spare. The smell of burnt hair was thick in his lungs. A Japanese soldier was mere feet away, holding a flamethrower and a rifle strapped to his back. Viktor scrambled away and ran down the slope, body sliding down half of the way. Mud splattered into his mouth and covered his face.When he reached the bottom, he looked back. The soldier was descending the slope too, already preparing his weapon as he slid down. Panic flared in Viktor’s chest. _Shit. This is bad._

 _How did the Japanese manage to get here so fast? They were supposed to take a few days to get here._ The question repeated itself in Viktor’s head as his ankle ached and he grabbed for the revolver in his boot. The handle was cold in Viktor’s grip and he fired a wayward shot into the mud five feet away from the soldier. That slowed down his progress for all of three seconds before he was running for Viktor again.

There was a tree just beside him, so Viktor ran the small distance and pulled up his body so he could lean against it, cheek pressed down into the rough tree bark. He aimed and released a tiny breath, finger pressing down on the trigger.

The shot hit the soldier square in the shoulder, his right arm falling to his side and his left coming up to clutch at his wound. He let go of his flamethrower, but he didn’t slow down in the slightest, legs still moving down the slope to reach Viktor. Viktor felt his chest tighten and he aimed, another shot ringing out. A dull thump followed.

Rain blurred Viktor’s eyesight, and he squinted enough to see the uniformed soldier lying face first in the mud.

A beat of silence. And then the man moved; the second wound bleeding a reddish-black across his hip. He tried running down the rest of the slope, but really he just slid down, the mud giving way beneath his boots. By then he was too close for Viktor to shoot. The rain fell harder, and Viktor ran unevenly to meet him, his shoulder colliding with the Japanese soldier’s abdomen. A breathless gasp escaped the soldier’s lips.

They both fell to the muddy ground.

Viktor still had his revolver in hand, and he raised it up to bang against the soldier’s skull. An elbow smashed into his jaw a second before the revolver came down and he bit into his tongue. Viktor spat out the coppery blood that filled his mouth and dug a knee into the other soldier’s wounded hip, feeling the blood there seep into his clothes. The man beneath him cried out and landed a punch across Viktor’s cheek. The force of it was enough to make Viktor black out for a moment, his grip on the revolver loosening enough for the other man to kick it out of his hands. His chest squeezed so tight it might’ve exploded.

_Fuck!_

Viktor scrambled up, hands digging into the mud to pull himself up.

Warmth rushed into his cheek as a bruise formed where the Japanese soldier had hit him, the vision in his left eye slowly closing up in a black eye. He couldn’t see where his revolver had fallen. He wheezed as he grasped blindly at the muddy terrain beneath him.

Metal swished through the air. Viktor knew what was coming, but still he cried out when the blade of the other soldier’s bayonet sliced through the skin of his back. Red hot blood bloomed across the fabric of his jacket and he felt it running down in warm rivulets down his back. He gasped for air like a dying fish, knees knocking hard against the ground as he fell. His eyesight dimmed as he blinked away the rain water.

 _I’m going to die,_ Viktor thought. He heard the soldier above him screaming out something in Japanese, probably calling for his squadron to tell them he’d just found one of the American pilots. Viktor grit his teeth, hands shaking as he pulled down the left sleeve of his jacket and his shirt enough to expose the skin of his wrist. He didn’t feel the prick of tears filling the corners of his eyes, but he felt them running down his bruised cheek.  He blinked them away. _I’m going to die, and I never even knew my soulmate’s name._

It was half-obscured by the cuff of his piloting gloves, but just seeing his soulmark one last time was enough.

Viktor got his soulmark earlier than anyone else he knew, so that meant that he waited for his soulmate’s reply to him longer than anyone else. He waited for eighteen years, had lived by himself his whole life, and now that he was dying he couldn’t even cry for himself. Viktor lay there in the mud, bleeding and most probably dying, and he cried for a soulmate he spent over a decade connected to but until now didn’t even know their name.

The sobs Viktor released had a tight hold over his throat, the breaths that he managed to gasp into his lungs choked and barely enough to keep him going. All he could hear was his own breathing and the deep bass of his heart, beating faster and faster. _Dum-Dum. Dum-Dum._

Maybe that’s why he didn’t notice the soldier growing silent.  But soon enough Viktor realized that the sounds of rainfall were all that was left of the noise that surrounded him, and through a coughing fit that brought up a line of blood to the side of his mouth, Viktor opened his eyes and looked up.

The Japanese soldier was young, younger than Viktor at least, and expressionless. He had stopped yelling for his mates and was looking down at Viktor unblinkingly.

Viktor blinked at him, and the tiny action seemed to make his wound bleed even more.

The other man had a hand dangerously close to the inner pockets of his army jacket. He wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses, the glass splattered with mud and Viktor’s blood. The light of the faraway lightning lit up the glass and hid the man’s eyes from Viktor’s sight. His hand, pale and trembling, moved to dig into one of his inner pockets. The line of the stranger’s lips was pale and unmoving.

Viktor felt a flame of rage as he watched the soldier dig out a weapon from his pocket’s uniform. He was already dying— he couldn’t do anything about it. Viktor would die here cold and alone in the forest and the bayonet wound was more than enough to do that job. Shooting him through the head would just be another sign that Viktor meant so little to the Japanese solider.

He let the rage curl his fingers into tight fists, nails biting into the skin of his palms.

His whole body was still hurting, but Viktor bit the inside of his cheek and screamed, the sound coming from the back of his throat and sounding much deeper and rougher. His left arm jutted out to feel around for his revolver and when he felt its cold handle brush a fingertip it took less than a second to grab in and fire a single bullet.

This time, the shot hit home.

Blood exploded from the soldier’s mouth as the bullet wound in his abdomen painted his whole uniform red. The man was already kneeling in the mud, so he fell forward, half onto Viktor and half into the mud. Viktor felt the blood that the man spluttered out wet his shoulder and he winced, shrugging the man’s body off of his.

The man’s glasses had fallen to the ground, so by the time Viktor had thrown off the other soldier’s dead weight off of himself, the man was looking up at Viktor with watery brown eyes. Viktor looked back.

Another splutter and blood splashed across Viktor’s face. The man was still digging around in his jacket pocket for something, and Viktor had the urge to shoot him again. Before he could really think about doing it though, the man finally tugged out his hand from the layers of fabric. He wasn’t digging around for a gun.

In the light of the storm, Viktor saw a notebook clutched in the Japanese soldier’s hands.

The soldier pressed it into Viktor’s weakening grip, the notebook taking the place of the revolver that was still warm in Viktor’s hand. A heavy thump came from the handle as it fell to the ground. Viktor squinted down at the little notebook, the blood loss and the shock taking over his body making him dizzy. “What is this?”

He hadn’t bothered to translate his words, so the question came out in Russian, the language still more familiar compared to English.

As if understanding Viktor’s words, the man coughed up more blood and pointed to the notebook’s bloodied cover. Viktor felt the little blood that remained in his body grow cold.

Written on the cover, with trembling English letters, was Viktor’s name.

The handwriting reminded Viktor of his own when he had first started learning English, the uncertain lines and curves like that of a beginner. He opened up the notebook as the soldier lay down gasping for breath on the ground beside him. “Oh.”

The first note Viktor had ever written to his soulmate stared up at him on the first page. It had been copied in the same shaky handwriting as that of the cover. Another page and the next note was there, still in the same handwriting. Viktor’s hands shook and he bit into his lip hard, hard enough to draw blood that dripped onto the notebook’s aged pages.

He flipped through the notebook and found all of his notes inside. About half-way the notes had lines of Kanji underneath Viktor’s English notes, like whoever wrote it was replying.

Viktor didn’t bother reading the last few pages, and really, he couldn’t now, with all the tears that blurred his vision. He wrapped his hands around the notebook and curled into himself, gasping with the force of his sobs. He cried hard enough to block out the pain of the wound at his back. Hard enough not to hear the thunder crashing behind him like an orchestra. 

“Viktor?”

The pronunciation lilted upwards into a _u_ that followed the last syllable of his name, the voice speaking soft enough to be considered whispering. Viktor snapped his eyes open.

The unnamed soldier was still lying down beside him, the splatter of blood at his lips gleaming. He had a weak hand balled up in the material of Viktor’s jacket, and he looked up at him with clear, brown eyes. “Viktor?” He asked again.

Viktor surged down, wrapping his arms around the man’s shoulders and hoisting him up enough to hold their chests close. Their twin heartbeats thundered between them. It was a struggle to find the words in English. “Yes. Yes. That is me.”

A breathtaking smile curled at the soldier’s lips and he coughed, more blood leaking down his mouth. Tears fell from his beautiful brown eyes as the rough cough turned into a breathless laugh.

The hand that had been balled up at his jacket was suddenly caressing Viktor’s face. Viktor leaned into the touch, and as his eyes snapped to look at the soldier’s hand, he caught a glimpse of the soulmark on the man’s wrist.

Their identical soulmarks were a thin dagger, lying crosswise over their wrists.

Viktor turned his head and pressed his quivering lips to the man’s wrist. He was gasping again, crying and laughing between the huge gulps of hair he took in.

He looked at the unnamed man I front of him. They were both dying, weak laughter escaping their mouths and tears streaming from their eyes. Viktor looked, and he asked the only question that mattered.

“What’s your name?”

The Japanese man blinked. Viktor repeated himself. “Name?”

And then the tearful brown eyes widened in realization. Blood-red lips parted to speak. “Yuuri.”

“Yuuri,” Viktor repeated, the name rolling off his tongue. He was very weak now, and let go of Yuuri’s –his soulmate’s— body. He still wrapped his arms around him as they lay down on the muddy ground. “Yuuri.” He repeated, and then again. “Yuuri. Yuuri. My Yuuri.”

The cold was crawling up Viktor’s body.

He looked down at Yuuri and saw that the man was just barely breathing now, the hand he had on Viktor’s cheek stilling until it was just a gentle weight against his skin. His lips still moved even as he gasped for breath, Viktor’s name curling his lips in a silent whisper.

The rain pounded down on them, and Viktor was glad. _My soulmate’s name is Yuuri._        

           

**Author's Note:**

> tbh i forgot when to post this, but I do know that the soulmate prompt is for day 6 so this is my best guess lol. Check out my tumblr for fanart of yoi and other things that make me smile! User name is mr-doctor-felicia 
> 
> kudos and comments feed my hungry soul and are very much appreciated


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